Clever Girl (21 page)

From time to time we had postcards from Sheila, who was travelling in South America. The cards were laconic, with minimal information – ‘I am here’, or ‘I saw this’, or ‘it wasn’t really like this’. The pictures on the front were in brilliant kitsch colours, Mayan ruins or bougainvillea or smiling Guatemalan peasants in costume. We had no address for writing back to her. Daphne disapproved, she said that the whole backpacking thing was only another twist in the whole history of Western voyeurism and exploitation. I pinned the cards above my desk because Sheila’s adventures felt like a counterpoint to the adventures inside my head – as fantastical as anything I read about, yet in a real life, plotted on the earth’s solid surface.

I decided I didn’t want to embark on an academic career and for a while I had no idea what to do instead. Then my brother Philip had an accident on his motorbike, breaking both legs, and an occupational therapist came to my mother’s house to measure the steps and examine the bathroom to see if he could manage at home on his crutches. I was casting about in my mind for the shape of my future life and something about that work appealed to me: its mix of imagination and practicality. I liked the fact that each case was something new, with a unique set of problems – material ones jumbled together with psychological ones, like in a story or a novel. I hoped that the work would take me out of myself and plunge me in the world, making me bolder and more generous; until I was tested, I didn’t know if I was capable of these qualities. Even before I’d taken my Literature finals, I applied to an Occupational Therapy Diploma course, and got a place. And OT was a good choice, it suited me; I have worked more or less in this field ever since. Of course there was a lot of idealism in my reasons for choosing it – the reality was bound to be more complex, less heroic.

All this happened before Mac ever got back in touch. Sometimes he tells the story – not apologetically, but proudly – as though he interrupted my brilliant academic career, stormed into my life and carried me off when I was on my way to being a Professor of Anglo-Saxon or something. But it wasn’t so. At the time when I was making these plans for my future, I had put Mac entirely out of my mind – love had healed over behind him, like water swallowing that black stone I’d thrown into the pool. The first time I had any news of him was one afternoon in the summer, after I’d finished my last exam and before I started my Diploma. Lizzie came round and I made her tea; we sat drinking it with all the casement windows in the attic open to the falling rain, because the air was so hot and heavy. A horse chestnut which grew across the road was as tall as the tall houses; my room looked into its top branches and I could hear the intimate settling noises the rain made, soaking through the tree’s layers. Lizzie talked on to me about her children in that burrowing, persistent way she had – everything was Frances now, who played the cello; Piers was written off as rather a disaster. I wasn’t bored, exactly, but I wasn’t concentrating; the weather made me restless, as if I was expecting something to happen – or perhaps I only filled that in afterwards, after something did. When Lizzie was at the point of going, she remembered she had a message for me.

— A man came looking for you, she said. — A peculiar man, Stella! Something about him – head down in his shoulders, like a bull charging; said he didn’t know where you lived, but that he’d found out where Fred had moved to, from the school. Very persistent. I told him I’d only known you vaguely, had no idea where you were now. I thought he might be a debt collector.

And she gave me Mac’s card, with something written on the back in pencil, in his big, wobbling, separated letters, with the hollow full stops. Mac had terrible handwriting – not scrawled or hasty so much as naively deliberate, as if, at school, in his impatience to be grown up, he had bypassed ever acquiring a cursive style. He was always angry writing anything by hand, preferred stabbing at a typewriter or a keyboard with one finger. I couldn’t read his message while Lizzie was there in the room with me. I pretended I had no idea who he was and kept tight hold of the card, its corners digging into my palm, while I went all the way downstairs with her and watched her put her umbrella up, crossing the street, rain fizzing on the taut red nylon and my heart straining painfully, impatiently.

— Call me, Mac wrote peremptorily. — I have news.

He’d given ‘news’ a capital N, and drawn a ring round his printed telephone number, his work number, in the same thick pencil. I hid the card in a pocket of my handbag and didn’t do anything. Sometimes I thought I could hardly remember Mac. He belonged to the past, when I was abject and dependent and hadn’t achieved anything.

Then he and I bumped into one another, quite by accident, only a few weeks after I got his card – at the Royal Infirmary, of all places. We had never met up accidentally before, in all those four years we were apart. I was at the hospital with Rowan, who had problems with persistent ear infections and needed grommets to equalise the pressure. Taking Rowan to his appointments was always fraught; he dreaded the examinations and reacted badly to the tedium of the waiting – although he was stoical when the doctors probed painfully in his ear (I knew how much it hurt because of how he stared ahead into nothing with a set face, and gripped my hand which he wouldn’t hold at any other time).

Mac had never seen either of my sons except in the photographs I’d had around in the flat. When we three were suddenly confronted in a corridor (I was lost and in the wrong place, Rowan was berating me), the encounter felt momentous. Luckily the corridor wasn’t busy. Mac seized me by the elbows, almost accusing me (‘Where have you been?’), and I was aware of Rowan transferring his resentment on to the stranger. I think Mac was surprised by Rowan in the flesh; I don’t think he’d taken in from the photographs how dark-skinned he was, or how striking. I loved seeing other people respond to his beauty – the skinny lithe length of him, the spatter of freckles of darker pigment across his nose, long hollow cheeks, lashes clotted as densely black as paint. He didn’t look like my child. I explained about our appointment and that we were lost; Mac said he was just visiting. He and Rowan stared at each other, calculating. I could hardly take Mac in, bulky in a beige raincoat with rain splashes on the shoulders, preoccupied and out of place. I had always expected that if I ever bumped into him I would be shocked by how old he was – but actually he seemed unchanged, utterly familiar: his vigour and willpower, the taut thick skin of his forehead and neck. I saw that his round head did sit on his shoulders like a bull’s. He was holding a greengrocer’s paper bag and I guessed he was bringing grapes for someone ill.

I thought all of a sudden that it must be Barbara who was ill, she must be dying. Perhaps that was why he’d come looking for me at Fred’s, why he was holding my arms now so tightly, as if I might try to escape. But Barbara was fine, Mac said. He realised his grip was embarrassing me and let go. At least, she was fine as far as he knew. He was visiting a nice chap who worked for him and had had an operation on a duodenal ulcer.

— What d’you mean, I said, — as far as you know?

— Come
on
,
Mum, Rowan insisted.

Mac explained that Barbara had left him. She had found out about certain things – here he glanced severely at Rowan, cutting him out – and when she confronted him and he told her the whole truth, she’d gone. (She’d found, he told me later, a forgotten leaflet from the gallery at the bottom of his sock drawer, with my name written on it. — Something was funny, she’d said. — Because you’ve never liked that painting.) Mac had tried to reason with her – she’d been adamant. (Apparently Barbara had asked him whether he still felt anything for me, and when he had reflected, he’d said that he did, he loved me.) This had all happened a few months ago, and he’d been looking for me ever since.

— The axle has broken that keeps the stars, he said. — And all that.

But I had forgotten the Yeats poem and didn’t know at first what he was talking about. Anyway, now he’d found me, he wasn’t going to let me go again without a struggle – unless I told him where I lived, that is. Though probably he was too late, I’d made arrangements with someone else, hadn’t I, by now? I said I hadn’t. I asked about his daughters and he said one was married, the other at the Royal College of Music. We stood smiling at each other then (and he reached out to hold me by the elbow again) in the blandly lit pastel-painted corridor with its signs pointing to rheumatology and cardiology and the renal unit, its sickly suspect smell of antisepsis and hospital food; we moved aside for a nurse pushing a trolley of drugs. Rowan was tugging at my arm, dragging me away. I scrabbled in my pocket for a pen, I wrote down my telephone number on Mac’s paper bag. Our luck – it was luck, wasn’t it? we scarcely knew what to call it yet – seemed a vivid improbable hopeful flare against this background of subdued suffering, shut away behind the hospital walls.

9

O
F COURSE
I
REGRETTED IT, MARRYING
Mac Beresford. Often I regretted it. Oh, the violence of those early years! I don’t mean physical violence. (Mac would never, ever hit me – and I’ve only hit him a few times, not all that hard – though once I threw a hardback book which grazed his temple and drew blood.) I can remember cleaning my teeth in the en suite bathroom of the house he took me to when we first lived together – the same house where he’d lived with Barbara, at Sea Mills with fifteen acres (it’s not where we live now) – and spitting into the sink and saying to myself over and over between spits that I cursed the day I met him. Cursed the day! For that moment it was quite true. What was I doing there in that bathroom – which was not to my taste at all, with its pastel luxury, concealed strip lighting, seashells stencilled on the walls, fish-shaped stone soap dishes, painted seaweed climbing up the shower tiles? This was Barbara’s taste, we were haunted by Barbara. (What pangs of longing, for my plain old attic at Jude’s.) I couldn’t meet my own eyes in the mirror over the sink, for rage at myself, at what I’d let myself in for. How could we two, Mac and I – with our infinite complexities, and our so-divergent experiences, which had hardened into our natures – be forced to fit inside this shared circle of a marriage, curled up as tightly together as yin and yang? That’s what marriage is like, I think – this squeezing of two natures into one space which doesn’t fit either of them. At least, that’s how mine was for a long time – now, it’s settled down into tranquillity (which brings its own complications).

One night I ran away from Mac in my nightdress. This was only a few months after I’d moved in with him – before he was even divorced, before we were married in the Registry Office. Usually we quarrelled about the boys, but they were away: Luke was staying with friends (he was sixteen), Rowan was at my mother’s. For Mac’s sake, I tried to set up these occasions when he had me to himself. Our quarrel that night wasn’t about any subject in particular; it was about the way Mac talked at me. I’d cooked something special and we’d been drinking Mac’s good wine (he knows his wine). Mac loved to tell me about his ideas. All day long at the factory, in the intervals between all the practical things he had to plan and decide, he was working out his theories of everything. He said, for instance, that he needed to believe that our experiences weren’t lost in time but were all held somewhere, coexisting simultaneously – in God’s mind, or in an alternative dimension where time was a kind of perpetual present. But if that were so, he puzzled, then everything terrible must also be held for ever as it happened: suffering would have no end, there’d be no relief in oblivion.

I knew he’d never talked about these things to anyone before. He had chosen me as the necessary listener, the one person on earth to whom he wanted – needed – to explain himself. He thought that no one else understood him as I could. (Barbara hadn’t ever wanted him to talk like this to her, she’d feared it. She had believed superstitiously, Mac said to me once, that talking about suffering could bring it on.) But when I tried to answer him and put in my part of the argument, it seemed to me that he waited kindly for me to finish then carried on regardless, uncoiling the tight-wound spool of his own thoughts. It might have been like this, I thought, if I’d been the wife of a great philosopher or a poet in the past; I would have sat at his feet and written down his ideas devotedly, then consoled him for them in the dark. Only Mac wasn’t a great philosopher, he was a factory owner, and it was me who had a humanities degree; I had read as much philosophy as he had (though he did remember more of what he read than I did, and was better at logical argument). Yet if I stopped speaking altogether – sat with my expression closed to him, rage in my heart – he didn’t even notice. (Perhaps it was a small thing to get mad about. Nowadays, when I love him steadily, I don’t want him to know my inmost thoughts.) Undressing in the bedroom that evening I felt I was smothering, because of the central heating and the fitted carpets everywhere. We didn’t bother to close the curtains in that room because the windows only looked towards the Portway and the river gorge, over the scrubland in front of the house where the horses grazed (these belonged to Lauren and Toni, Mac’s daughters). The windows were black and cold with night; I could see our lamps and our room reflected in the glass as if I was looking in from outside, and I saw myself moving around, putting away my clothes. Of course Mac wanted to end the evening with love-making.

— Don’t touch me! I snapped, pushing him away. I complained that he wasn’t interested in my opinions, he never asked me what I thought and only wanted me as his audience.

— It isn’t small talk, you know, Mac said, hurt, his forehead wrinkled and reddening with feeling. When I hated him I saw how his head was round and dense like a cannonball or a hard nut. — I’m telling you what’s really in my heart, things I’ve never shared with anyone. I’m talking to you freely: I thought you appreciated what that was worth. Would you rather I was polite, and paid you compliments and asked after your knitting?

I couldn’t believe he’d said that about knitting: martyred, exulting, I said I’d got a first-class mark for an essay on Bergson and T. S. Eliot. — Why would I want to talk about knitting? I can’t even knit! You don’t even know that about me.

Mac said I must be drunk (and probably I was – we often finished two bottles between us, sometimes we started on a third). He got into the shower and I ran downstairs, escaping outside. On my way out I picked up the keys to the little Peugeot he’d bought me for work and for running around in. I might have driven off, just as I was, barefoot in my 1940s vintage nightdress – and if I had, who knows whether I’d ever have come back again. But I saw in the light from the windows that the horses had come up to stand against the fence, and I went across to talk to them. Because I was cold, though the adrenaline from our fight was still surging in me, I nuzzled into their peppery smell and greasy, dusty heat – a secret life, rich with its own purposes, out there in the dark which had looked empty from inside the house. Misty was Lauren’s jaunty chestnut mare and my favourite; she jabbed at me with her nose, snorting and hoping for treats. (I cherished those horses partly as my way of making up to Lauren and Toni, who wouldn’t have anything to do with me at first.) Mac came out of the house behind me, calling my name, his towelling bathrobe tied over his pyjamas. He didn’t like the horses; he was afraid of them.

I climbed up over the gate and on to Misty, clinging to the tufts of her mane with both hands; then I set off riding across the field bareback. It was stupidly dangerous, I probably was drunker than I knew. (And on the way I lost the keys to the Peugeot, the only set: Mac was out early the next morning, eyes down, hunting for them everywhere. We never found them, and had to buy replacements.)

— Follow me, I yelled back over my shoulder. — If you want to keep me, follow me.

— You’re an idiot, Stella.

— I don’t care what you think. Follow me.

And he did follow – though not just obediently trotting after the horse, as I’d rather pictured it. (Misty shucked me off anyway, halfway across the field, not too roughly.) Mac went back inside first for a torch and wellingtons, and put one of the old picnic blankets over his shoulders, then set out to where I was waiting for him under the beeches. By the time he arrived all the anger had drained out of me. It was marvellous out there under the huge old trees soughing and groaning in the wind, dragging at their roots in the dark. Mac turned off his torch and on the blanket I clung to him passionately. — We could be in our comfortable bed, he said, bemused.

(I told him later that I believed there was a solution to the problem of time and suffering he’d proposed. It was only intractable if you came at it head on, wanting a single story; instead, you could try imagining that two time dimensions coexisted. In one, still moments were all held objectively for ever; in the other, time as experienced subjectively was always a flow, bringing the relief of endings. Nothing was added, in that model, to anyone’s suffering; on the other hand suffering – like happiness – wasn’t obliterated in the total sum of things, which it shouldn’t be if the sum of things is justice. I thought my idea was something like Bergson’s
durée
,
but a proper philosopher explained to me years afterwards that I’d got this wrong.)

Mac was made to be the father of daughters. There’s a photograph of him holding Toni minutes after she was born: he looks astonished as a bear with a princess in a fairy tale, afraid of his own strength, dreading already the boyfriends she’ll bring home. The girls brought out a patriarchal, sentimental streak in him and in return he fostered in them an inward-turning femininity. Self-important with their father’s adoration, they were bruised and scandalised by his betrayal. Toni, rounded and blonde like her mother, was a teacher in a primary school, and married by the time Mac and I moved in together (though she’d had a wilder phase, and before I knew him Mac had fought off a succession of unsuitable boys). Lauren was moody, a talented clarinet player, a changeling who didn’t look like either parent – very white-skinned, tiny, gamine with black hair and glasses and a sharp little muzzle like a fox. Mac and Barbara had worried together – and out of all proportion, I thought – through the various phases of Lauren’s giftedness and restless dissatisfaction. Later, when Toni got pregnant (by which time the sisters were more or less reconciled to the idea of me) I was ready to be supportive through the difficulty of her young maternity – only she didn’t find it difficult, she loved it uncomplicatedly.

It seemed to me that I worked hard at building relations with Mac’s family, while he hardly tried with mine. This was our longest-lasting and worst fight. (Then in his mid-sixties he capitulated all at once, genially making friends with everyone.) Mac said that it was different because the boys were living with us and of course that was true; but he couldn’t see that there was an imbalance in the settled hostility between him and them – he was an adult, so ought to hold back the whole force of his scowling intolerance of their mess and mistakes and ignorance. He claimed he was protecting me from how they took advantage of me. It was obvious, though, that he was jealous of how I loved them, and I told him so – in front of the boys, which wasn’t a good idea. But I think Mac would have fought with his own sons too, if he’d had any. His was that touchy, growling kind of masculinity which can’t resist tussling with other males and testing them. (Yet he was tenderly solicitous towards the craftsmen who worked for him at the factory.)

So we had some awful confrontations. Mac had never had to deal with anything like Rowan’s scenes before; Lauren had only ever slammed doors and sulked. He thought each row with Rowan was terminal – which was what Rowan thought too; in his tantrums he was desperate with self-destruction, provoking you to say the worst thing possible to hurt him, reaching as a simplification for the last unforgivable gesture which would pull down the whole edifice of his life. I can remember Mac holding Rowan at arm’s length by the shoulders, bellowing (‘How dare you speak to me like that?’), while Rowan kicked at Mac’s knees and Luke tried to intervene physically between them; or Rowan punching through a door panel; or Mac locking Rowan outside one night and Rowan appearing ghoul-like at the downstairs windows with his face flattened against the glass, smearing the panes with tears and snot. It all seems fairly absurd, in retrospect. What I can’t recover is what the rows were actually about, what small seeds of daily cause gave rise to those hurricane effects.

Mac managed to pick quarrels with Luke too – for smoking weed, for sleeping late, for missing school – though he was such an easy teenager and only ever did these things in moderation. Mac went berserk when he found that Luke had taken the Mercedes out one night while we were away (without a licence or insurance or driving lessons: like me, Luke was a natural driver). I had the dream-sensation sometimes that I was closeted again with the stepfather I’d spent my life getting away from. (‘Do you think the world owes you a living?’) When Rowan and Luke developed a comic parody of Mac’s outrage, I didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed: was he ridiculous? Perhaps that was the mistake I’d made, I’d married a fool: not the more interesting one, of marrying a monster. I knew Mac blamed Rowan’s behaviour on the way I’d brought him up. And no doubt it partly was because of the way I’d brought him up, but I wasn’t going to concede that. The trouble was that Mac took him on as an equal, refusing to see the suffering child with his white face and inchoate despair. (Though in the long run it may be that Mac’s refusal was better for Rowan than my sympathetic penetration. When Rowan came home at seventeen after living for a year with his grandmother in Glasgow, he and Mac were suddenly close, conspiring in glum distaste against my interrogations: ‘How are you feeling now? Are you happy?’)

I used to console myself, when things were at their worst, by spending Mac’s money. He didn’t mind me doing this, in fact he liked it; I suppose he thought my shopping expeditions were a sign that I acquiesced in the outward conditions of our life together. But I came closest to leaving him when I was using my credit card; I defied his logic, that his money was a power over me. I’d never had money in my life before. All through my twenties and early thirties I’d bought my jeans and shirts from charity shops and vintage stalls; it was strange to be in a position to choose whatever I liked – it was almost inhibiting, I didn’t know where to start. Mac joked that although some of the clothes I bought cost a fortune, they looked as if I might have picked them up at a jumble sale after all: silky slinky scraps, faded prints, torn bits of net and lace with velvet trimmings. That waif look was fashionable and it suited me – I even adapted it for work with plain black cashmere jumpers and flat shoes. I had my hair cut off short and spiky at Vidal Sassoon’s; I was still very thin. (Some of the women I worked with in my first job as an occupational therapist, attached to the adolescent unit in a psychiatric hospital, couldn’t forgive me for the cashmere and the thinness. But they didn’t like me anyway, they thought I was arrogant and aloof because I didn’t join in their gossip. I was out of my depth all the time I was at that unit – and I identified too sympathetically with the teenagers who were our patients.)